Jikes RVM is a bleeding-edge research project. You will find that some of the code does not live up to product quality standards. Don't hesitate to help rectify this by contributing clean-ups, bug fixes, and missing documentation to the project. We are in the process of consolidating and simplifying the codebase at the moment.

One goal of the JikesRVM project over recent years has been the ability to develop JikesRVM in a development environment such as Eclipse. This has been possible for the MMTk component since 2005, and as of early 2007 (release 2.9.0) it is possible to work with the majority of the JikesRVM codebase in Eclipse and similar environments. This is not yet as straightforward as we would like, and can be expected to improve with time.